Bernard Williams was one of the most important British moral philosophers of the twentieth century and one of the most penetrating critics of the ambition to ground ethics in a single, impersonal theoretical system. He taught at Cambridge, Berkeley, and Oxford. Against both utilitarianism and Kantianism, Williams insisted on the irreducible complexity of moral life, on the importance of the first-person perspective, of personal commitments and emotions, and on the inability of grand theories to capture everything that matters ethically. His writing combines classical learning, psychological sensitivity, and an elegant distrust of philosophical oversimplification.
Key Concepts
Integrity and the critique of utilitarianism (in Utilitarianism: For and Against, with J.J.C. Smart, 1973): Williams argues that utilitarianism, by requiring the agent always to maximize the general good, threatens integrity — the coherence between a person’s actions and their deepest projects and commitments. Through the famous examples of Jim and the Indians (in which Jim can save nineteen lives by himself killing one innocent) and George and the chemical weapons (a pacifist chemist pressured to take a job in armaments), Williams shows that utilitarianism treats the agent as a mere channel for states of affairs, ignoring that the agent’s actions are his own, that they spring from his commitments and constitute him as a person.
Ground projects: the central commitments that give a person’s life meaning and provide reasons for going on living and acting. Williams argues that a moral theory demanding the impartial sacrifice of these projects whenever the calculus of the good recommends it undermines the very basis of motivation and meaning — and, in the limit, the reason it would be worth being moral at all.
Moral luck (“Moral Luck,” 1976; in Moral Luck, 1981): against the Kantian idea that moral worth is immune to chance and depends solely on the good will, Williams holds that factors beyond the agent’s control — circumstances, outcomes, the agent’s very constitution — do in fact affect how we assess their actions and themselves. The example of the artist (modeled on Gauguin) who abandons his family to devote himself to art shows how the justification of a choice can depend on a success the agent did not control at the moment of decision.
Ethics and morality; thick concepts (Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, 1985): Williams distinguishes ethics — the broad Socratic question “how should one live?” — from morality (the morality system), a narrow conception centered on obligation, guilt, and a notion of absolute duty that he regards as impoverishing and culturally peculiar. He further distinguishes thick ethical concepts (such as “coward,” “brutal,” “loyal”), which combine description and evaluation and are rooted in concrete ways of life, from thin concepts (such as “good,” “right”), which are more abstract. He is skeptical that a systematic moral theory can ground the ethical life.
Internal and external reasons (“Internal and External Reasons,” 1979/1980): Williams holds that every genuine reason for action must bear some connection to the agent’s “subjective motivational set” — their dispositions, desires, and projects. Purely external reasons, which would hold for an agent independently of any element of their motivation, would, for Williams, be unintelligible as reasons capable of moving the agent to act.
“One thought too many”: Williams’s critique of the impartialist demand. Discussing the case of a man who can save either his wife or a stranger, Williams observes that requiring him to justify saving his wife by appeal to an impartial moral principle (something like “it is permissible, in situations of this kind, to save one’s wife”) introduces “one thought too many”: the personal relationship should already be, by itself, sufficient reason.
Influenced by
- The Greek moral philosophers, especially his reading of ancient ethics and tragedy
- Friedrich Nietzsche — the genealogical critique of morality
- The British analytic tradition in ethics and the philosophy of action
- The Humean critique of a purely external practical reason
Influenced
- Contemporary debates over the limitations of systematic moral theories
- The discussion of internalism and externalism about reasons
- The philosophy of moral luck, alongside Thomas Nagel
- The revival of virtue ethics and reflection on the good life
Works
Morality: An Introduction to Ethics (1972); Problems of the Self (1973); the “A Critique of Utilitarianism” portion of Utilitarianism: For and Against (1973); Moral Luck (1981); Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (1985); Shame and Necessity (1993), on Greek ethics; Truth and Truthfulness (2002).
See also
Thomas Nagel Bentham Kant